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shirley leung

Charlie Baker may be too popular for his own good

Governor Charlie Baker at a Boston playground in July.Barry Chin/Globe Staff/File

If Tom Menino was the urban mechanic, then Charlie Baker has become our suburban mechanic.

Wildly popular like the late Boston mayor, Baker revels in the state equivalent of filling potholes and picking up candy wrappers off the street. That means shortening the lines at the Registry of Motor Vehicles and cleaning up the books at the MBTA.

Baker is our Mr. Fix It — and in some cases, Mr. Nix It — and he’ll be first to tell you there’s nothing wrong with that. Why would he when the latest poll shows he has maintained a 70 percent approval rating among voters?

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We all know this won’t last forever, so it’s time for our governor to start spending his political capital on something that gets him out of his comfort zone. Sure, the governor is using some of it to support the controversial issue of expanding charter schools and to take on the unions that run the MBTA. But he should think of those moves as the beginning of something big, not achievements onto themselves.

Baker has a lot to be proud of. Not quite two years in office, he has become a national leader in fighting opioid abuse, and he’s rethinking how we treat mentally ill prisoners.

But I’m asking the governor to be bold, to think that he can solve the pressing issue of our time, which is income inequality. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap, and he can start by reimagining our schools in a way that everyone talks about it, but nobody has pulled off.

It’s about creating a system that’s not just one-size-fits-all factory, but one in which a kid from Roxbury who doesn’t speak English has just as much chance to succeed as a kid from Wellesley.

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It’s about getting universal pre-K done — some 30 percent of 3-to5-year-olds in the state remain unschooled. It’s about restructuring the school calendar — longer days and shorter summers — so more learning can take place for everyone, not just those who can afford after-school programs or camps.

It’s about getting the state to help more students not only attend college but graduate without being saddled with debt. Last year the state spent about $42.7 million on its MassGrant program to help the neediest students go to college. The average grant was about $838 — not nearly enough. In 1988, that grant used to cover 80 percent of the average cost at a Massachusetts public college or university; today it covers less than 10 percent.

Baker has his eye on these issues, such as launching the innovative Commonwealth Commitment program, which can cap the cost of a bachelor’s degree at a public college at about $25,000. But so far it’s a pilot — and if it really works, he’ll need to figure out how to pay for it.

Then there’s our wobbly public transit system. I don’t want to diminish what Baker has been doing so far because he’s injected much-needed fiscal discipline in getting the T back on track.

But there will come a day — and that day is coming soon — when he needs to start printing money. Just this week we learned the MBTA would be better off spending hundreds of millions of dollars to replace a portion of the Red Line fleet rather than trying to renovate existing trains. Such a move could increase capacity by 50 percent. The Red Line is what helps keep our innovation economy humming, and we can’t afford to be chintzy about it.

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So now comes the really hard part: How do you get the no-new-taxes Republican to spend money that he doesn’t have?

That’s where political capital comes in handy. It’s probably too much to ask him to get behind the so-called millionaires’ tax, a ballot petition to raise taxes on the rich. It’s a measure, if it makes it onto the ballot in 2018, that could bring an estimated $1.3 billion a year, money that could be used for education and transportation.

While Baker may be philosophically opposed to new taxes, he can pull a page from his own playbook and stay neutral. He could, as he has said many times before on ballot initiatives, just let the voters decide.

Looking back, I can tick off the legacies of governors who risked political capital to do something lasting. Mike Dukakis cleaned up the harbor and got the Big Dig underway. Bill Weld launched massive reforms in education and welfare. Mitt Romney, as much as he hates to admit it, helped stitch together universal health care. Deval Patrick invested $1 billion on a biotech initiative and made Massachusetts a player in clean energy.

Baker is a good governor, but to be great, he’s got to start spending political capital instead of hoarding it.

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Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.